Hi all,
I finally broke down and used my meager 3d budget to get the “V3 and M3 Shapes for Genesis” and I was very pleased to see my old gals again.

For the sake of getting on with testing, I used the loaded Lana on DAZ4.0, but also found 2 V4 textures from another store imported very well. The morphing is very easy under the shaping tab with a slider, I zip it up to 100% and there “she” is.

I was able to sucessfully conmingle V3 hair with V4 clothes and some Genesis hair/clothes. Very gratifying indeed! Sometimes, after posing, some tweaking is needed, but overall, looks pretty good so far. When using the “fit to” which calls up a small dropdown menu, the selection is not large, so I chose “shirt” for V3 Fantasy Necklace, and “boots” for shoes. It gets them very close and often fits well.

Of course, the “send to Bryce” won’t work with Genesis, at least in my experience, but Export from Daz as obj is very well imported into Bryce—using Rashad’s guidelines for scale.

Then some of the transparencies and bumps have to be tweaked with Bryce using the right export—for writing to surface so you can tell the parts by their name. It goes pretty fast, and the renders have been very satisfying in Bryce 7 Pro. Now I am having fun. I did not like the Genesis type models I prefer the “bone structure” in my faces, and with the V3&M3; Shapes the pudginess is overcome.

Encouraged by my good results, I purchased the V4 and M4 Shapes for Geneis and am playing with that to see what can be done in DAZ4.0 and exported for rendering in Bryce. Will let you know. Have no idea if this will work or be updated for DAZ 4.5. For now, I’m just happy to mix and match and get some creativity going.

Hi all,
I finally broke down and used my meager 3d budget to get the “V3 and M3 Shapes for Genesis” and I was very pleased to see my old gals again.

For the sake of getting on with testing, I used the loaded Lana on DAZ4.0, but also found 2 V4 textures from another store imported very well. The morphing is very easy under the shaping tab with a slider, I zip it up to 100% and there “she” is.

I was able to sucessfully conmingle V3 hair with V4 clothes and some Genesis hair/clothes. Very gratifying indeed! Sometimes, after posing, some tweaking is needed, but overall, looks pretty good so far. When using the “fit to” which calls up a small dropdown menu, the selection is not large, so I chose “shirt” for V3 Fantasy Necklace, and “boots” for shoes. It gets them very close and often fits well.

Of course, the “send to Bryce” won’t work with Genesis, at least in my experience, but Export from Daz as obj is very well imported into Bryce—using Rashad’s guidelines for scale.

Then some of the transparencies and bumps have to be tweaked with Bryce using the right export—for writing to surface so you can tell the parts by their name. It goes pretty fast, and the renders have been very satisfying in Bryce 7 Pro. Now I am having fun. I did not like the Genesis type models I prefer the “bone structure” in my faces, and with the V3&M3; Shapes the pudginess is overcome.

Encouraged by my good results, I purchased the V4 and M4 Shapes for Geneis and am playing with that to see what can be done in DAZ4.0 and exported for rendering in Bryce. Will let you know. Have no idea if this will work or be updated for DAZ 4.5. For now, I’m just happy to mix and match and get some creativity going.

Well if you have Studio 4.5 installed you should be able to import Genesis. There is another user in this forum that has shown a Bryce scene with 4 Genesis figures all sent via the bridge. I don’t know if the Gen 3 or Gen 4 shapes would make a difference, I do know large hi res textures like the elite series does. All that’s more just to let you know the bridge is working better these days, that being said though Rashad’s method is still the best way if you want the character to look it’s best.

@LordHardDriven Well, I’m just tiptoeing up to version 4.0 in DAZ, don’t have 4.5 yet installed. Will the V3/M3 and V4/M4 shaper programs work in version 4.5? Sounds promising that the bridge can now handle Genesis figures in “send to Bryce”. Hair doesnt come through with transparencies in import, so that takes a bit more time. I don’t think the V3 stuff had any metadata, being old products.

I’ve tried some V4 on Genesis. I’ve found it interesting that I can load several of the V3 clothes from the Content Manager but nada for V4. The icon shows say for 4 V4_Pharoah clothes items but clicking on any of them does nothing. No file error message. Just nothing.
[edited later] Ok. Problem here solved. I did not have all the boxes X’d in the search window so only mats were found which of course wouldn’t load. So check the boxes, check!

I can import V4 clothes to Genesis just fine, and then “fit to”. I did nothing special to the Content Manager except for running the scan for content a couple of time recently when I purchased some new content from DAZ (yay sale!) . it seems to have a mind of its own, so I just install DAZ stuff wherever it wants to go, and I install non-Daz stuff in my own Content folder organized so I can find stuff for import. I did not go through the redownloading for metadata because I had to redownload everything a year or so ago for new computer and that was not even completed then it was so confusing and time consuming. Now, without the ps_xx ids, it’s more confusing.. So it may be my own “mismanagement” that I can’t find the V4 readily in DAZ 4.0, but my real concern was that I could use the clothes and textures on Genesis, which I can, so I’m happy with that.

I loaded a non DAZ hair that is problematic anyway, and a non DAZ v4 texture with character morph. The injection for the morph did not work, but that’s ok for now. I imported a non DAZ clothes and chose from the fit -to menu items that seemed appropriate for the body area. Example: swim suit top as shirt, tight. The reason for the non DAZ is, as I eplained above, I can find it easier and I’m in a hurry to get going. Some rainy day with a tv marathon of a show on I like, maybe I’ll try to fix the content in the Content Manager. If I want to find something for DAZ, I open DAZ 3 and see my item, then browse to file location, write that down, and then try it in 4.0. I can load for example the V4_Pharaoh stuff in DAZ 3 just fine on to the v4 model. So I don’t know why DAZ 4 can find the items but won’t load them.

Bryce lets me choose my textures’ bump and diffuse color which is a lot of fun after I get my obj’s loaded but they usually import well asis.

@LordHardDriven Well, I’m just tiptoeing up to version 4.0 in DAZ, don’t have 4.5 yet installed. Will the V3/M3 and V4/M4 shaper programs work in version 4.5? Sounds promising that the bridge can now handle Genesis figures in “send to Bryce”. Hair doesnt come through with transparencies in import, so that takes a bit more time. I don’t think the V3 stuff had any metadata, being old products.

I’ve tried some V4 on Genesis. I’ve found it interesting that I can load several of the V3 clothes from the Content Manager but nada for V4. The icon shows say for 4 V4_Pharoah clothes items but clicking on any of them does nothing. No file error message. Just nothing.
[edited later] Ok. Problem here solved. I did not have all the boxes X’d in the search window so only mats were found which of course wouldn’t load. So check the boxes, check!

I can import V4 clothes to Genesis just fine, and then “fit to”. I did nothing special to the Content Manager except for running the scan for content a couple of time recently when I purchased some new content from DAZ (yay sale!) . it seems to have a mind of its own, so I just install DAZ stuff wherever it wants to go, and I install non-Daz stuff in my own Content folder organized so I can find stuff for import. I did not go through the redownloading for metadata because I had to redownload everything a year or so ago for new computer and that was not even completed then it was so confusing and time consuming. Now, without the ps_xx ids, it’s more confusing.. So it may be my own “mismanagement” that I can’t find the V4 readily in DAZ 4.0, but my real concern was that I could use the clothes and textures on Genesis, which I can, so I’m happy with that.

I loaded a non DAZ hair that is problematic anyway, and a non DAZ v4 texture with character morph. The injection for the morph did not work, but that’s ok for now. I imported a non DAZ clothes and chose from the fit -to menu items that seemed appropriate for the body area. Example: swim suit top as shirt, tight. The reason for the non DAZ is, as I eplained above, I can find it easier and I’m in a hurry to get going. Some rainy day with a tv marathon of a show on I like, maybe I’ll try to fix the content in the Content Manager. If I want to find something for DAZ, I open DAZ 3 and see my item, then browse to file location, write that down, and then try it in 4.0. I can load for example the V4_Pharaoh stuff in DAZ 3 just fine on to the v4 model. So I don’t know why DAZ 4 can find the items but won’t load them.

Bryce lets me choose my textures’ bump and diffuse color which is a lot of fun after I get my obj’s loaded but they usually import well asis.

Unfortunately I’m even less far along with Studio then you. I have both 4 and 4.5 but have yet to install any of them. The whole business with metadata and the content manager scares me, I’ve heard things from others that frankly make me want to avoid those things like the plague. So I stick with Studio 3 for now as it does all I need it to do.

I hear you on the product id thing. I’ve been a customer of Daz for around a decade and I have developed a fairly substantial collection of content (several thousand items). This would have been hard to manage if it weren’t for the old product id’s because at a glance I could tell what program it was for and whether it was a prop, morph, pose, texture, figure, character, application add-on, etc. Now I can’t tell any of that other then what program its for and if I ever want any semblence of order in my collection I now need to rename those several thousand items I bought previously. This was especially annoying in that when I asked about it the closest thing to an explaination I got as to why was because there were some items under the old system that were incorrectly catagorized (ie texture being catagorized as a morph or vice versa). So rather then fix the mistakes and/or reprimand the person responsible they just throw out the old system and create something completely new and different and too bad for you as a customer if this disrupts any system of organization you made based on their previous system of naming files.

Anyway the reason it’s better to follow Rashad’s method is the way studio handles things may be fine for studio but isn’t fine for Bryce. So things aren’t always transfered in a way that is correct for getting the most out of Bryce. Rashad’s tutorial on how to work with characters in Bryce explains things better then I can though so I’ll not try to elaborate further.

The only thing I can add beyond what I’ve said is that if you’re feeling okay with Studio 4 go ahead with studio 4.5. There was something early on with it (not sure what since I don’t really follow studio developemnt closely) that turn off/scared alot of people but near as I can tell it got straightened out quickly and is now doing pretty well and I’ve heard few complaints about it since here in the bryce forums.

ere is one of my successful Export from DAZ4.0 to Bryce 7Pro. The hair looks solid because it doesnt seem to have transparencies to apply. It is “MirandaJones” hair by ktaylor/Mylochka from ShareGC for V3/V4. I like it for the sleek pageboy look The top knot can be hidden or covered with a rose. I wanted to see how plastic or how ok it would appear. The image was cropped and I applied a “multiply” layer to see details otherwise too washed out.

The dress is V3 Princess of Atlantis from DAZ overlain on the V3 MFD on top of the V3 clone on Genesis. This is a net style dress with embellishments and embroideries. The transparencies do not export from DAZ4.0 but it’s a quick fix in Bryce. I just go in and copy/paste the mask for several items. Bryce is smart enough to load the correction into the rest of the garment. This is one of my favorite outfits for a mermaid theme. I also have the V3 Princess of India outfit, and it worked the same way with Export. Extreme poses do not work well as I don’t understand “handles” and the DAZ4 pose controls are not so clear to me as far as how they are listed and what they will or will not do. I liked the old diagram with the dots in DAZ3. Could twist a leg right round the whole body with a crazy sweep of the mouse!

Send to Bryce just crashes in DAZ 4.0. I hesitate to load 4.5 because of the same discussions mentioned. I’ll wait a litte bit more, because I do want “backwards” ability with the files. I still have Bryce 5.5 scenes that I like that I might want to adjust pose in DAZ3.

Here I worked in DAZ4.0 with the V4 clone overlay. with the V4/M4 Shapes. I used DAZ Tootsie/Classic Roll hair for V4 and a Crinoline short sleeve dress by Jan19 with texture by Chohole from ShareGC. The body texture is V4 Elinoir by StudioArtvartanian. The clone injection for Elinoir. did not work. I like to use textures where there is not a lot of makeup and there are more distinctive eyebrows and thinner lips.

The dress is problematic as it is not very flexible, and the necklines are loose. A better strategic pose helps with all the crinolines. I love the textures that Chohole made for Jan19’s crinolines, which are available on her website and also at ShareGC. They come out so well in Bryce with depth and transparencies for richness.

This image was rendered too dark. I did not place another light which I normally wood. I used a “screen"layer and cropped.

The next image is V3 with an MFD gown texture, part of a medieval dress from DAZ. The V3 MFD collar is a problem on the Genesis clone as V3. it does not load right and does not pose well so I left it and the other V3 MFD accessories off. I liked the texture of the bodice so I used it here, with the bump increased.The hair is Boris for V4 by StudioArtvartanian. I did not do much with it, except to load the mask for transparencies in Bryce. The face is a typical V3 with makeup—those Crawford lips! I like to see how extreme it is from the Genesis face. The body texture is Lana rr as loaded in DAZ4.0. This is as rendered, except for cropping. I use the AA regular mode for all the images rendered in Bryce. I find going a bit darker excuses a lot of details that would otherwise be noticeable. The plant is a Bryce flower doubled. [edited to add the Weeds image] [editied again to correct hair reference: same artist but it is KourosII for V4, not Boris]

This is the Princess of India on MFD for V3 from DAZ loaded onto Genesis in DAZ4.0 with the V3 Shapes. Necklace is on the V3 Fantasy collar. The body texture is V4 Sundari by vyktohria but you can see the facial structure is still V3. Kinda neat! The hair is Wild Orchid DAZ/PropsChick and Goldtassel. I didn’t add the flowers only adjusted the pose of the front braids to rest properly on chest.

I really liked the V3 clone accepting the V4 texture—that was kind of magical. Not every texture seems to strectch on the V3 if there are too much morph-specific makeups.

The image was cropped, and I used a “screen” layer to show the details better since I had rendered in Bryce this one darkly.

The images posted on this thread showcase the “archival” items I was interested in, that were designed for V3 and will work in DAZ4 on Genesis. They are not perfect, as I did not include props or interesting scenery. My next test will involve Export of such models with props loaded in DAZ4.0 using Rashad’s scaling suggestion, to see if they position in Bryce successfully from Import to Bryce/Export from DAZ4.0.

It’s occurred to me, duh! That I should show a before and after so the Exported model from DAZ4.0 can be understood better.

Here is the Princess of Atlantis on V3 MFD loaded onto Genesis via the V3/M3 shaper plugin. Using the Export function in DAZ 4.0, choosing to use names of surfaces, and the rest of Rashad’s suggestions. The hair is Sissy leBeaux by StudioArtvartarian. It is a particularly flowing and “fluffy” hair so I chose that as a good example for this export.

This model will not “send to Bryce” from DAZ 4.0.DAZ crashes and Bryce twiddles its thumbs waiting requiring a forced shutdown through TaskManager on Windows7.You know it’s going to happen just before it does, when Bryce pops up a window that says “Please Wait”. about a few seconds after trying to load. But it appears to be DAZ that crashes per Task Manager.

Anyway, back to successful importing! The first image here is the model as exported as on OBJ and imported into Bryce7 and rendered with AA regular. Observe the “black turtleneck”, which is the MFD dress without transparencies loaded. The masks load, but Bryce doesn’t copy/paste to obtain them, one must do that for each set requiring the masks, in Bryce’s texture window. Sometimes, the Blend Transparency is not checked, or the button is not placed in the transparency tray. I just exported this from DAZ4 today and imported/rendered in Bryce to show what I am talking about. Next is an image of the same model that I had reworked in Bryce to get the transparencies on the dress and the hair.

Ice Scribe: I personally don’t think the Vickie in the white dress is rendered to darkly. With the dark portion of the sky, the way the light hits the figure, the shadows on the figure, I personally think you’ve done a real good job. To me, the mood says “I see something that’s a bit frightening.” I also like how the figure standing on the water turned out. Another nice image.

@GussNemo
thank you for the encouraging words. I found by using the large tilting button, the skies can be very different than just a straight on loading. Like the figure in white’s skies, they can take on interesting shapes that can add to the mood. I did light that one with a distant round light, but moved the light away.

I guess my next tests will be moot, if the new version, DAZ4.5 truly sends Genesis to Bryce.

DAZ4.0 will not send to Bryce even a grey non clothed/haired model. It will export it. From the same scene, each selected item, like hair or boots will send and position in Bryce until I get to Genesis. Then Daz 4.0 crashes.

The major differences between these two methods is grouping. If you want to move something “send with Bryce”, you have to be sure that not only the group is selected once loaded in Bryce, but also some meshes usually left out, like pants which I don’t understand. But you will see what meshes are left out when you rotate the group. Undo right away, select those and add to group. However, sometimes this doesnt work.

Export makes a single group of whatever is in the scene, so if you just work on a person, it all goes, clothes, body parts, etc. This makes it easier to resposition in Bryce. In both cases, transparencies and reflectivities, bumps, may have to be reapplied in Bryce.

I am still hesitant about loading up DAZ4.5 because of the new file structures. I’ll wait a while on that and continue my workarounds. I have not read anything about sending a complete textured, attired, haired and posed Genesis to Bryce in the 4.5. version. Does this truly work now with grey plastic Genesis and more importantly with some fluffy complex hair, some transparencies, some reflections, some different and legacy skins and morphs, do they “send to Bryce” with those things fixed?

From your posted render, I can see that Genesis made it to Bryce, which is good news. Your render is great, with that foggy myserious atmosphere! Bryce can do that and more. I’ve been a fan of Bryce since version 4 but only got going with it a few years ago. There is always something to learn, and yet Bryce will give such satisfying renders right from the start. I hope you will find Bryce enjoyable for a long time and look forward to seeing more of your renders.

Thank you guys. Bryce can do nice atmospheres and give some ambiance to a scene, plus better terrain, trees, water etc than DS. At the beginning I wanted to transfer from bryce to DS, but the renders are far from Bryce level this way. I’m only at the beginning of my (long) in Bryce